


Truth is stranger than fiction

by Karieauthoress (ksrandomme), ksrandomme



Series: Sandburg's Problem [3]
Category: The Sentinel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-30
Updated: 2009-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-19 11:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ksrandomme/pseuds/Karieauthoress, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ksrandomme/pseuds/ksrandomme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim catches a clue. Now what does he do with it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truth is stranger than fiction

  
It was all I could do not to snatch him up into my arms and demand that he tell me about that night. That damn, fucked up night. I should have known… hell I KNEW something was wrong. I’m the fucking Sentinel of the fucking Great City, aren’t I? But I held my tongue. He was sleeping now and I would leave him there. He slept so little on so many nights. And there was yet another clue as to what screwed him up. Used to, give the man a flat surface and enough silence and he would be asleep in a matter of minutes. Sleeping the sleep of the just.

  
But not anymore. Often times, I would wake up from his tossing and turning on the small bed that was in his room, his moans and cries more than sufficient to have me tumbling down the stairs at a near dead run, crashing to his side to pull him, bodily, into my embrace so that I could sooth him either fully awake or into a much more peaceful sleep. Now I sleep on the couch until his alarm goes off, then slip quietly into the bathroom as if I hadn’t just spent the entire night in my clothes from the day before. If he was going to have a nightmare, then I wanted to know about it first thing, not half an hour into it and half asleep trying to help.

  
At first he hated me intruding in his privacy in that manner. Now he just accepts it, letting me sooth him and then pushing me off, mumbling something about going back to sleep. So I don’t know if he just feels bad about it or if he just doesn’t care anymore. I don’t know which thought I hate more. Both, I think.

  
When I’m pretty sure that he is asleep for the first part of the night, I delve back into my memories, trying to sort out what happened that night from the clues left behind. As I seriously take stock of what was left behind, I notice that there was a LOT left that I had ignored before. The saline smell in the air that I could taste whenever I was close to him. The heat from his body as it rushed past mine. Not from anger, but more like… shame. The short, clipped answers to any of my questions. It felt like he was hiding something, but what I wasn’t sure.

  
But there was more there. Lavender and Jasmine and something that smelled like Honeysuckle. Not anything that he wore. And it was very strong, like a woman’s perfume. Searching my memory, I can’t come up with a single person who ever wore that particular combination. I close my eyes and think back, remembering there being three glasses on the table that evening. Two had lipstick. That meant two visitors. Both women.

  
I remember I had called him when it got too late, telling him not to wait for me. Thinking back, that should have been a BIG fucking clue that something was wrong. He nearly climbed out of his skin to make a dinner that he never ate, after I had called him to tell him not to worry about it. But in the background when I had called him, I remember there had been a knock on the door. And he had opened it before hanging up the phone, and I had heard the voices of two women talking to him.

  
And I knew those voices… both of them…And my blood is running cold now, here in the present as I remember the voices from the past.

  
Two women, both having been spurned by us. One he had dated several times before he tried to call it quits. And one… that I had been married to just long enough to be too long.

  
“Oh fuck…”


End file.
